Nigerian Police Crack Down on Scammers, Shuts Down Hundreds of Websites
Nigerian Police Crack Down on Scammers, Shuts Down Hundreds of Websites
Posted 10/23/2009 at 7:45am
| by Paul Lilly
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Nigeria has long been a hotbed for scams - either that, or we've all made a terrible mistake by not wiring over thousands of dollars to unknown recipients for a multi-million dollar payout down the line. Believe it or not, people still fall for it, so we're pleased as punch that Nigeria's anti-corruption police force has stepped up to the plate with some major busts.
"Over 800 fraudulent email addresses have been identified and shut down,"Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) boss Farida Waziri said in a statement. "There have been 18 arrests of high profile syndicates operating cyber-crime organizations."
This doesn't mean you'll never see another Nigerian scam mail in your spam box, but hey, at least it's a start. And going forward, the EFCC feels pretty confident it can make a dent. Rather than rely on raiding cyber cafes and waiting for complaints to trickle in from the public, the EFCC said it is using smart technology in conjunction with Microsoft to actively track down fraudulent emails.
The EFCC hopes this is the just beginning. Working at full capacity, the crime unit believes it can forewarn about a quarter of a million potential victims within the next six months.
Image Credit: Flickr firoze shakir photographerno1
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Muerte
October 23, 2009 at 11:15am
I'm torn. After all if your so greedy as to fall for this kind of crap then you kind of deserve what you get. But I'm still glad that they are doing something about these people.
Is that a real T-shirt? Its hilarious.
foamcup
October 23, 2009 at 9:09am
This is great, but scamming is serious business over there. I saw a video of a raid on an internet cafe to shut down some scammers, and like the whole freaking city turned out to throw rocks and crap at the police as they hustled the prisoners into the vans and drove off in haste.
MeTo
October 23, 2009 at 9:01am
We need away to report such e-mails in USA. They are such a waste of time and are bad for unsuspecting people. We should be able to right click on e-mail and report it to The FTC.
fusa
October 24, 2009 at 11:15am
You can, just forward the spam to spam@uce.gov http://www.ftc.gov/spam/ Some email clients will even let you create rules to auto forward e-mail on pre defined conditions.
Some of their scams aren't the obvious "send me your bank information and you will receive $10,000,000" I recently moved and several houses advertised for rent on craigslist were asking for the rent to be sent to Nigeria. The address was an actual street in the town advertised. Never checked if the address had a residence at the location. Might be a suprise for the real owners if it was.
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